Friday, July 27, 2018

On Monday, the Windows Developer team announced the preview release of the Windows UI Library. Windows UI Library, or WinUI, is a set of NuGet packages which contain UWP XAML controls and other features which can be used across different versions of Windows 10. Many of these will be compatible with release from 1607 to the latest Insiders Fast Ring builds.

Windows developers will no longer need to wait for their users to adopt the latest Windows 10 release in order to provide some of the rich features provided by these packages, like Fluent controls.

Microsoft.UI.Xaml.Core.Direct - Provides access to XamlDirect APIs on versions of Windows 10 that do not yet support these APIs.

Want to get started with WinUI? Here's a quick step-by-step guide to creating a project, adding the NuGet packages, and adding a couple of the new XAML controls to your main Window. Want to add WinUI to an existing UWP project? As long as your project's Minimum version is at least 14393 and Target version is 17134 or later, you can follow the same steps to add the NuGet packages.

Next, open the NuGet package management window for your project. Select Browse, and search for Microsoft.UI.Xaml. Be sure to select the "Include prerelease" checkbox next to the search field or you will see no results.

Add the packages you want to use. After adding Microsoft.UI.Xaml, a readme file will open advising you to add the following snippet to your project's App.xaml. Be sure you do this immediately after installing the package.

So, what controls are included in the Microsoft.UI.Xaml package? If you open Object Browser, you will currently find a huge list classes under the Microsoft.UI.Xaml.Controls namespace. A few of the new and updated controls include:

ColorPicker

DropDownButton

SplitButton

LayoutPanel

MenuBar

NavigationView

ParallaxView

RatingControl

PersonPicture

Repeater

Scroller

SwipeItem

TreeView

TwoPaneView

Lots to love for sure. Documentation of the classes in this namespace can be found here, although much of it is currently limited and only labeled as prerelease.

Ready to play? Go check out the Getting Started article on MS Docs and the XAML Controls Gallery code on GitHub! Remember this is currently prerelease code and may undergo some change before it goes RTM.